#SMCChicago Recap – February 2016

It’s been a few years since I’ve dropped into our local Social Media Club meetings and I have to say I was glad to be back. Saw a few familiar faces last night and met a handful of some really high-quality social pros. The event was held at 1871, a startup coworking space that is an awesome mecca for entrepreneurship and ideas. Love this place, wish I could spend more time here helping startups grow!

This month’s presenter was Jeff Ernst of a social WOM startup named Smync. Jeff himself is no marketing startup, I had to smirk when he mentioned a few times that he’s not new to this “marketing” thing. Really intelligent guy, sparked some great ideas and really grateful for people like Jeff are willing to share and collaborate.

Here’s some of my mental notes and ideas sparked from Jeff’s engaging talk.

Advocate portals are not going to get people to share, it’s the brand loyalty and the level that users are actually advocates and care about your brand.

How do you strengthen your brand enough to not need to hire social influencers. Jeff has a really interesting metric that he dropped, most consumers are actually more loyal to brands than social influencers. Which I believe.

"Paid influencers are actually trusted less than the brands" #smcchicago